Paris Is Always a Good Idea Read online

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  All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

  —MARTIN BUBER

  One

  Rosalie loved the color blue. It had been like that for as long as she could think. And by now it had been twenty-eight years.

  That morning, as she did every morning when she opened her little postcard shop at eleven o’clock, she raised her eyes, hoping to discover a streak of blue in the gray Parisian sky. She found it, and smiled.

  One of Rosalie Laurent’s earliest and pleasantest childhood memories was an unbelievably blue August sky over a turquoise sea bathed in light that seemed to extend to the end of the world. That was when she was four years old, and her parents had left the heat of Paris with its stony houses and streets to take their little daughter to the Côte d’Azur. That same year, after they had returned home from that light-drenched summer in Les Issambres that seemed never to want to end, Aunt Paulette had given her a box of watercolors. Rosalie could remember that equally clearly.

  “Watercolors? Isn’t that a bit excessive, Paulette?” Cathérine had asked, an unmistakably disapproving note in her thin, high voice. “Such an expensive box of paints for such a small child? She’ll have no idea what to do with them. We’d better put them aside for a while, don’t you think, Rosalie?”

  But Rosalie had not been prepared to give up her aunt’s precious present. She threw a tantrum and clung to the paint box like grim death. Finally her mother, with a sigh of annoyance, gave in to the defiant little girl with the long brown braids.

  That afternoon Rosalie was utterly absorbed for hours filling page after page with brush and watercolors until the watercolor pad was full and the three little pots of blue paint in the box were nearly empty.

  Whether it was because that first view of the sea had burnt itself into the little girl’s retina like a metaphor for happiness, or because she had developed early on a desire to do things differently from other people, the color blue enchanted Rosalie more than any other. With amazement she discovered the whole gamut of the color, and her childish thirst for knowledge was almost unrestrainable. “And what’s this called, Papa?” she would ask again and again, pulling at her good-natured and indulgent father’s sleeve (which was, of course, blue), pointing at everything blue that she could find. She would stand in front of the mirror for hours, her brow wrinkled in concentration, studying the color of her own eyes, which at first glance seemed to be brown, though if you looked at them carefully and for long enough you would realize that they were actually deep, dark blue. At least that was what Émile, her father, had told her, and Rosalie had nodded with relief.

  Even before she could read and write properly she knew the names of the finest distinctions and shades of blue. From the lightest and most delicate silken blue, sky blue, gray blue, ice blue, powder blue, or glassy aquamarine, which gives wings to the spirit, to that powerful, radiant azure that almost takes your breath away. Then there was also invincible ultramarine, cheery cornflower blue, cool cobalt blue, greenish petrol blue, which conceals the colors of the sea within it, or mysterious indigo, which almost shades over into violet, on to deep sapphire blue, midnight blue, or almost black midnight blue where blue finally reaches the end of its spectrum—for Rosalie there was no other color that was so rich, so wonderful, and so multifaceted as this. And yet she had never expected that she would one day encounter a story in which a blue tiger played an important role. Even less did she expect that this story—and the mystery that lay behind it—would change her life completely.

  Chance? Fate? They say that childhood is the ground we march on our whole lives long.

  Later, Rosalie often wondered if everything might not have turned out differently if she hadn’t loved the color blue so much. At the thought of how easily she might have missed the happiest moment in her life she almost panicked. Life was frequently so impenetrable and complicated, and yet surprisingly everything always made sense in the end.

  When, at the age of eighteen, Rosalie—her father had died a few months before of a protracted bout of pneumonia—announced that she intended to study art and be a painter, her mother nearly dropped the Quiche Lorraine she was carrying into the dining room in shock.

  “For heaven’s sake, child, please—do something sensible!” she shrieked, inwardly cursing her sister Paulette, who had obviously put these foolish ideas in the girl’s head. She would never have cursed out loud, of course. Cathérine Laurent, née de Vallois (which gave her a somewhat exaggerated idea of herself), was a lady through and through. Unfortunately the wealth of this once noble family had been seriously reduced over the last couple of centuries, and Cathérine’s marriage to Émile Laurent, a clever and lovable, but unfortunately not very assertive, physicist, who ended up stranded at a scientific institute rather than producing the hoped-for success in the world of business, did little to improve matters. In the end they didn’t even have money for proper servants anymore, apart from the Filipina cleaning lady who was hardly able to speak French and came twice a week to the old Parisian house with its high, ornate plaster ceilings and herringbone parquet flooring to dust and clean. Nevertheless, for Cathérine it was out of the question to give up on her principles. If you didn’t stick to your principles, everything would go to the dogs, she thought.

  “A de Vallois doesn’t do that sort of thing” was one of her favorite phrases, and of course she also sent her only daughter, who was regrettably developing in a totally different direction from the one her mother had marked out for her, on her way that day with this phrase ringing in her ears.

  With a sigh, Cathérine put the white porcelain dish with its steaming quiche down on the grand oval table that was set for just two and thought once again that there was hardly anyone she knew for whom the name Rosalie was less fitting.

  Back when she was pregnant, she had in her mind’s eye a delicate girl, blond like herself, polite, gentle, and somehow … delightful. But Rosalie turned out to be anything but that. Admittedly, she was clever, but she was also very strong willed. She knew her own mind, and sometimes she said nothing for hours on end, which her mother found peculiar. When Rosalie laughed, she laughed too loudly, and that was hardly elegant, even if other people assured her that Rosalie had something so refreshing about her.

  “Let her be, her heart is in the right place,” was what Émile always said as he gave in to yet another of his daughter’s whims. Like the time when, as a child, she had dragged her new mattress and the expensive bedclothes onto the damp balcony to sleep out in the open air. Because she “wanted to see how the world spins!” Or the time she baked her father a disgusting blue birthday cake colored with food dye that looked as if the very first bite would cause fatal poisoning. Just because she had this thing about blue. That was really taking things too far, thought Cathérine, but Émile naturally thought it was great and insisted that it was the best cake he ha
d ever eaten. “You all have to taste it!” he shouted and served up the spongy blue mess on the guests’ plates. Oh, good old Émile! He simply couldn’t refuse his daughter anything.

  And now this latest idea!

  Cathérine wrinkled her brow and looked at the tall, slim girl with her pale face and dark eyebrows as, lost in thought, she played with her long, brown, carelessly braided pigtail.

  “Get that idea right out of your head, Rosalie. Painting will never pay your way. I cannot and will not support anything of the sort. What do you think you’ll live on? Do you think people are just waiting to snap up your pictures?”

  Rosalie carried on twisting her pigtail and gave no answer.

  If Rosalie had been an enchanting Rosalie, Cathérine Laurent, née de Vallois, would certainly have had no worries about her daughter’s livelihood. After all, there were enough well-heeled men in Paris—and then it would not matter if their wives did a little painting on the side, or had any number of passing enthusiasms. But she had an uneasy feeling that her daughter didn’t think in those categories. God knew whom she’d finally end up with!

  “I’d really like you to do something sensible,” she repeated emphatically. “That’s what Papa would have wanted, too.” She put a slice of the steaming quiche on her daughter’s plate. “Rosalie? Are you even listening to me?”

  Rosalie looked up, her dark eyes unfathomable.

  “Yes, Maman. I should do something sensible.”

  And that is what she did do. More or less. The most sensible thing that Rosalie could imagine, after a couple of semesters studying graphic design, was to open a postcard store. It was a tiny establishment on the rue du Dragon, a pretty little street of medieval houses in the heart of Saint-Germain, a stone’s throw from the churches of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Sulpice. There were a few boutiques, restaurants, cafés, a hotel, a boulangerie, and Rosalie’s favorite shoe store; Victor Hugo had even lived here at one time, as a plaque on house number thirty showed. If you were in a hurry, it didn’t take many strides to pass through the rue du Dragon, to reach either the very lively Boulevard Saint-Germain or—in the other direction—the somewhat quieter rue de Grenelle, which led to the elegant houses and palaces of the government quarter and then ended on the Champ de Mars beneath the Eiffel Tower. But you could also, of course, just stroll aimlessly along the little street and stop again and again because you’d seen something nice in one of the displays—something that cried out to be tasted, picked up, or tried on. On those occasions it could take quite a while to reach the end of the street. That was how Rosalie had discovered the FOR RENT sign in the empty antique shop whose owner, feeling herself too old to continue, had given up her business a short while before.

  As a rule, the more slowly you walked, the more you actually saw.

  Rosalie had fallen in love with the little store straight away. There was a sky-blue frame surrounding the single display window and the entrance to its right, with the old-fashioned silver bell the previous owner had left behind hanging over the door. The light fell on the old black-and-white tiles of the floor in little circles. There was a cloudless sky over Paris that day in May, and it seemed to Rosalie as if the little shop had just been waiting for her.

  Admittedly, the rent was anything but cheap, but it was probably still reasonable for the good location, as Monsieur Picard, a tubby, elderly man with receding hair and crafty brown button eyes, assured her. There was also another room above the store, reached by a narrow wooden spiral staircase, with a little bathroom and a tiny kitchen beside it.

  “So you have an apartment as well, right on the spot, ha ha ha,” joked Monsieur Picard, and his little belly quivered with satisfaction. “What sort of business are you thinking of, mademoiselle? I hope it’s nothing that makes a noise or smells—after all, I live in this building, too.”

  “A stationery store,” said Rosalie. “Gift wrap, writing paper, pens and pencils and beautiful cards for very special occasions.”

  “Aha. Well, well. Good luck, then!” Monsieur Picard seemed a bit nonplussed. “Tourists always like buying cards with the Eiffel Tower on them, don’t they?”

  “A postcard store?” her mother shouted down the phone in disbelief. “Mon Dieu! My poor child, who still writes cards these days?”

  “I do, to name but a few,” Rosalie answered and then just hung up.

  Four weeks later she was up on a ladder outside her store, fixing a painted wooden sign over the entrance.

  It said LUNA LUNA in large, curving letters and beneath, slightly smaller: ROSALIE’S WISHING CARDS.

  Two

  As far as Rosalie was concerned, it would have been fine if a lot more people wrote letters and cards. The minor—and sometimes major—pleasure still provided even nowadays to the receiver and also the writer of a handwritten letter could simply not be compared with an e-mail or a text, which would be quickly forgotten and lost in the abyss of meaninglessness. That brief moment of wonderment when you suddenly found a personal letter in the mail, the joyful anticipation as you turned over a postcard, carefully unstuck an envelope or ripped it open impatiently. The possibility of holding in your hands a piece of the person who had thought of you, studying their handwriting, sensing their mood, maybe even catching a trace of tobacco or perfume. That was so very vivid. And even if people nowadays wrote letters ever more infrequently, because apparently they had no time for them, Rosalie didn’t know anyone who wouldn’t like to receive a personal letter or a handwritten card. The present with all its social networks and digital gadgets had very little charm, she thought. It might all be effective or practical or fast—but it definitely lacked charm.

  In the past, opening the mailbox must have been a bit more exciting, she thought as she stood in the lobby of the building before the row of mailboxes. The only thing you regularly found there these days was bills, tax demands, and junk mail.

  Or notices of a rent increase.

  Rosalie looked at her landlord’s letter with annoyance. This was now the third increase in five years. She had seen it coming. In recent weeks Monsieur Picard had been so exceptionally friendly every time she met him in the hall. And every time as they parted he had sighed deeply and said that life in Paris was getting dearer all the time.

  “Do you know what a baguette costs these days, Mademoiselle Laurent? Or a croissant? Do you know what they charge for a croissant in the boulangerie? It’s unbelievable! I ask you, what is there in a croissant—water and flour, and nothing more, is there?” He had shrugged his shoulders and made an accusatory gesture, looking at Rosalie with a mixture of indignation and despair, before shuffling off without waiting for an answer.

  Rolling her eyes, Rosalie went into her shop. Of course she knew what a croissant cost. After all, she ate one every morning—much to René’s annoyance.

  René Joubert was tall, dark haired, and extremely sporty. He’d been her boyfriend for three years and was a personal trainer. Perhaps, Rosalie sometimes thought with a sigh, in the reverse order. René Joubert took his profession very seriously. He preferred working with well-heeled women from the upper ranks of Parisian society who were very happy to have their figure, their fitness, and their health looked after by this good-looking young man with his sports diploma, his gentle brown eyes, and his well-honed body. René’s appointment book was always full, but, as it seemed, the top layer of Parisian society was not enough of a challenge to his abilities. At least, he never failed to take every opportunity to try to convert Rosalie to a healthy, exercise-filled life (mens sana in corpore sano!) and to point out the dangers that lurked everywhere in food. On his death list—at the very top!—were the croissants Rosalie loved so much. (“White flour is poison for the bowels!” “Have you never heard of wheat belly?” “Do you actually know how much fat there is in those things?”)

  Rosalie, who had her own idea of what makes for a happy life (which did not necessarily include power training, muesli, or soy milkshakes), was not at all impressed, and all
her boyfriend’s missionary efforts had so far failed miserably. Rosalie just couldn’t see why she should eat “grain.” “Grain is cow fodder and I’m not a cow,” she used to say and then spread thick layers of butter and jelly on a piece of croissant and stick it in her mouth.

  René watched her with a pained expression.

  “And anyway, nothing tastes better with a café crème than a croissant or a baguette,” she went on, brushing a few crumbs off the bedclothes. “You have to admit that.”

  “Then just leave out the café crème, a kiwi and spinach smoothie is healthier in the morning anyway,” retorted René, and Rosalie nearly choked on her croissant with laughter. That was really the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. A morning without coffee was like—Rosalie tried to find a suitable comparison—was … just unimaginable, she concluded to herself.

  At the very beginning, when she’d only just met René, she had allowed herself to be persuaded to join him on his early-morning run through the Jardin du Luxembourg. “It’ll be great—you’ll see,” he had said. “At six in the morning Paris is a totally different city!”

  He might well have been right, but the old, pleasantly familiar Paris, where you stayed up late at night and drew, wrote, read, debated, and drank red wine, then began the next day comfortably in bed—best of all with a large cup of milky coffee—was much more to Rosalie’s taste. And while René ran beside her under the old chestnut trees with great gazellelike strides, trying to involve her in relaxed conversation (“you should only run at a pace that allows you to chat properly”), she started to puff after the first hundred meters and finally stopped with a stitch.

  “The beginning is always the hardest,” said her coach. “Don’t give up now!”

  Like everyone who’s in love and tries very hard at the outset to merge symbiotically with their partner and adopt their preferences, Rosalie had even given in to René’s entreaties and tried it one more time—but alone, and not at six o’clock in the morning—but after a centenarian with a tottering gait, his body bent terrifyingly forward, his arms swinging wildly, had overtaken her, she finally said goodbye to the idea of becoming sporty.